Re: What's an annex? stratum?

Jim Blandy
2007-06-26T21:55:55Z

The question "is X worthwhile" is ill-formed. We all understand that
the real question is, "given our time and abilities, is X among the
things we should do now?"

At the moment, GDB:

- can't print a C++ map<string, string> value in any reasonable form,
or even a vector<int>, or carry out many other essential C++
operations,

- can't debug multiple processes at the same time,

- is slow to start up on large programs, and uses a lot of memory,

- can't let other threads continue to run while one is stopped,

- can't be scripted in a reasonable language,

- or do many other things we all could think of.

Time spent on the internals documentation has, itself, no effect on
users' experience with GDB. It's only worthwhile if that time, plus
the time then spent doing something users *will* notice, is less than
the time needed just to do something user-visible without internals
documentation.

I want to hear an internals documentation advocate say, "I'm going to
work on the internals documentation because I think the date at which
user-visible project X is complete will move closer when I do so."

I am *not* a seat-of-the-pants coder. Read prologue-value.h or
macrotab.h if you want to know my values. But I know that life is
short and uncertain, and that the pursuit of beauty has no regard for
that.